Wall Street Embraces MBS’s Money Man

On November 14, Wall Street feted Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the head of Saudi Arabia’s nearly $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund and a close confidante of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (MBS). At Cipriani—a private members’ club at 55 Wall Street—bright flowers at the center of the tables matched the ruby-red drapes. This gala, thrown by the Business Council for International Understanding, was a mark of the massive volume of Saudi investment capital percolating through the American economy. That itself isn’t new, but in recent years it’s become clear that the shame associated with Saudi funding in the wake of the grisly 2018 murder and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi has faded. Few seemed to even notice that the governor of the Saudi Public Investment Fund—which a Senate subcommittee is currently investigating for undue foreign influence in the fund’s seemingly hostile takeover of the PGA golf Tour—was receiving an award in Manhattan.

On stage in Cipriani’s Greek revival ballroom, the president of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, presented Al-Rumayyan with a large crystal paperweight. Sitting with them at the long head table was HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington, and among the hundreds of minglers making their way through the room were hedge-fund titan Ray Dalio, Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel, former Trump adviser Dina Powell McCormick, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.

The evening’s theme—“Champions of Change: Values in Practice”—couldn’t have been more incongruous for Al-Rumayyan, the billionaire lieutenant to one of the world’s most brutal rulers. (I had hoped to attend in person to investigate whether anyone there had qualms about honoring MBS’s money man. Sadly, I was told that the proceedings were closed to journalists.) But the whole event managed to avoid greater scrutiny because Saudi power in the United States, under successive presidents, has become so normalized.

In 2023 alone, the Public Investment Fund spent $31.6 billion worldwide, and it currently holds about $20 billion worth of US stocks. Beyond its vanity projects like the futuristic city of Neom or its gifting of $2 billion to Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, PIF is planning a staggering $40 billion AI fund. Meanwhile, its venture capital arm has doled out about $3 billion a year to Wall Street stalwarts and the entire universe of private equity and venture capital firms powering Silicon Valley. “There’s no distinction between the [Saudi fund’s] money and the de facto ruler, who is Mohammed bin Salman,” Hala Aldosari, a Saudi activist living in exile in the US, told me.

This is not just a Trump phenomenon. President Joe Biden’s about-face—capped by fist-bumping MBS on a visit to the kingdom in 2022 that broke with his campaign pledge to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah”—explicitly gave American business permission to go all in. Since Israel launched its war on Gaza, the Biden administration has further revived MBS’s global stature and tamped down its already muted human rights rhetoric. As Aldosari put it, “It’s going to get worse with Trump now, but in terms of US foreign policy in the Middle East, it’s very much problematic regardless of the political party.”

In anticipation, many American and international companies are already expanding their dealings in Saudi Arabia. Even the consultancy founded by the late Madeleine Albright, which long held itself out as a values-driven firm, just opened a headquarters in Riyadh.

In Saudi Arabia, basic freedoms have not improved since Khashoggi was lured inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and murdered. The regime’s crackdown on women’s rights activists has accelerated. “It’s the worst we’ve ever seen,” Aldosari says. Prison sentences are getting longer even for relatively low-profile cases, as part of what she calls the regime’s “systematic approach” to snuffing out dissent. She cited two women recently prosecuted for their tweets, notably Nourah al-Qahtani, who was jailed for 45 years and Salma al-Shehab, who received 34 years. Plus, earlier this year, a Saudi cartoonist named Al-Hazza was sentenced to 23 years.

In a new report, Human Rights Watch documents how the Public Investment Fund has enabled internal clampdowns in Saudi Arabia. Drawing upon newly released court documents, Human Rights Watch notes that Al-Rumayyan was a key figure in the 2017 Ritz roundup in which 200 wealthy Saudi royals and businesspeople were detained and blackmailed in the luxury hotel in Riyadh.

While it’s tough to get American business to care about issues of global human rights, the risks inherent in working in an autocracy might get their attention. Human Rights Watch details how the state has repeatedly expropriated the assets of people and companies, without due process.

One Saudi entrepreneur based in the US (who would speak to me only on the condition of anonymity) emphasized that Western corporations that engage with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund are exposed to financial as well as reputational risks. “By associating with a fund connected to human rights abuses, they face increasing backlash from investors, consumers, and global stakeholders demanding ethical accountability,” he told me. “The absence of reliable dispute resolution mechanisms in Saudi Arabia leaves companies vulnerable to arbitrary practices, such as unjust expropriations, without any credible options for redress.”